How Should One Read a Book?

In addition to experimenting with literary form and writing novels that would come to define 20th-century English Literature, Virginia Woolf was a prolific thinker and essayist on topics that ranged from women’s rights to the changing role of art in her times. 

Among her musings is a piece titled “How Should One Read a Book?”, where Woolf provides insight to the layperson reader on good practices when it comes to reading fiction. 

Woolf in 1902

Woolf in 1902

1. Read with an open and curious mind.

To get the fullest experience of a book, Woolf suggests that we reserve all judgement and set aside all manner of expectation during our reading of it. There are styles of writing that seem, at first glance, incomprehensible. We might be tempted to condemn the writer right away, as someone who writes pretentiously, vaguely, or plain poorly, even.

If we were to read the way of Woolf, this would involve, firstly, understanding that what is printed on the page was written by someone who wanted to communicate something to us. Like in verbal conversation, communication is a two-way exchange and effort has to be made on the part of the reader to pause and slowly linger on the words, to take time to reread a line or two until the dense paragraphs begin to unravel themselves into ideas that make a little more sense to them. 

The very dedicated can consider taking up Woolf’s suggestion to “put themselves in the author’s shoes.” What Woolf means is this: try writing something yourself – take a scene from your day and attempt to capture it in words. Chances are that this will be a bit of a struggle. After you find yourself spent, swimming in writer’s block, you would turn from your sparse Word file back to the segment of the novel you were previously struggling with and perhaps you would be better able to appreciate the writer’s mastery of the craft.

2. Give yourself time after reading to digest what you’ve just read.

Instead of jumping to the next seconds after you have closed the covers of your latest read, take a break to dwell on the experience of what you have just read. Avoid any mentally-taxing endeavours and create space for ideas to solidify in your subconscious mind before reflecting on them. Take time to formulate your own impressions of it.

The modern pressure to eat our way through an infinitely looming number of titles may max-out our boasting rights on Goodreads, but it also limits the depth of our comprehension.

3. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should or should not be reading.

Independence, asserts Woolf, is the most important quality a reader can possess. After all, the novel is an art form, and reading, an intensively personal activity. Sitting on the shelf, a book is simply a stack of pages stamped with black ink. Open it, and it comes alive in our minds – we have an active hand in co-creating with the author on the stage that is our imagination, a performance that is unique to every person based on our individual memories in and exchanges with the world. 

As such, it is only natural that different people would have varying opinions about the merits of particular books.

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”

But what are we to depend on if not the voices of professionals and critics in order to evaluate what makes a good book? According to Woolf, what we can do is read so much and so widely we develop good taste and have a clearer awareness of what kinds of stories we gravitate towards.



Jean Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, c. 1769.

Jean Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, c. 1769.

 Final Thoughts

This essay was particularly delightful for me to read. I am privileged to have been brought up by bibliophiles, and to have grown up around shelves spilling with all manner of poetry anthologies, modernist classics, and sci-fi novels. Although my parents loved reading, they believed that reading was a personal activity best enjoyed alone, and they never dictated what I should read or how I should read. Thus, a great deal of my childhood was spent traversing these fictional lands, however I pleased.

This freedom became much more elusive after I began my journey as an undergraduate, which presented me with tried theories, ideal methods, and established schools of thought to view a text through. Reading became a tiring, intellectual exercise in which I felt the almost-palpable gaze of my professors and dead theorists boring through the back of my head, never failing to scrutinise my interpretations.

This semester, I wanted to relearn how to read for pleasure, without an agenda, and I think that Woolf has given me good ideas to run with.

“After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.”

Thought Woolf’s advice was helpful? Try on her perspective with your next read, then revisit “How Should One Read a book” and the rest of them in The Second Common Reader for more insight.

ByShauna Cheong

ReadNUS Editorial Team